conspiracy theories that ended up being true

Not sure what the Dept of Energy has to do with pandemic forensics, but whatever

That conclusion has got a lot of pushback from virologists etc, ie the people who actually know about how viruses evolve and jump species.

I wonder what the Dept of the Interior thinks lol

Dave Emory thinks the whole "lab leak theory" is cover for what was a bio attack by the U.S. against China.

i don't understand the 'most likely' statement when it's immediately followed up by 'low confidence'. I personally think it seems plausible that this leaked from a lab. who fucking knows.

it's really less of a big deal than the "rah rah China did it" xenophobic assholes want it to be

https://abcnews.go.com/Health/lab-leak-theory-report-covids-origins/story?id=97493392

While we’re putting “advisors” in Taiwan, the government is blaming the Chinese government for a global trauma? Shocking!

even those that believe it was probably not lab leak have stated it can't be ruled out insofar proving a negative is difficult this many years after the fact.

have to imagine if it was a known lab leak a whistleblower would have come out by this time (as whistleblowers within China did speak up about the Chinese government's initial cover-up of the pandemic), unless it was a lab leak of a virus that an animal in a lab had and nobody knew they had it.

at this point I'm just weary of the whole discussion. the people screaming about it louder are doing so because a) they want China sanctioned, b) they want to spread Asian hate, c) they assume if a lab leaked the virus , there must be a secret lab-created antidote because these people's scientific beliefs are based on 80s cartoons

what's ironic about conspiracy theorists going "see! I told you so" about this is that the whole reason people didn't wanna talk about this was because of them! like it wasn't just "it escaped from a lab" it was "it was developed to be used as a depopulation bioweapon by Dr. Fauci and Jimmy Kimmel". iirc the articles I read pointed out a lab leak couldn't be ruled out but it wasn't particularly likely

it sucks that everything about COVID has become so politicized that people have a vested interest in the facts going a particular way to fit their narrative and react viciously if they don't. not just talking about nutbar conservatives either.

When John Burn-Murdoch released his study in 2021 that the mortality rate in the UK had started to fall below that of the flu, he got destroyed by left-wing COVID scolds calling him a "COVID minimizer" for....reporting statistics that he had heavily acquired over time in meticulous fashion. humorously, he also got called a "COVID doomer" for being part of one report that took a less sunny look at the pandemic (long since forgot which one).

you had one aerosol expert tweeting at another that they were putting "thousands of lives at risk" because they wrote one tweet response that had a major difference of opinion on how much of a difference industry-wide ventilation changes would make.

you get the "my freedums" segment, calling anybody a "mentally ill doomer that wants to lockdown forever" any time someone suggested taking actions to curb a wave (that pretty much never included lockdowns).

and everyone's opinions on the efficacy of masks seemed preserved in amber even before the first studies showed up.

(surprise - studies showed they did reduce transmission, but didn't all agree as far as how much)

I'll take "unspecified reduction" plz, just re-upped my N95 stash

otm. i got a fresh box here as well

lot of deflection here re the biden-adds-inches facts imo

The part about the "lab leak" theory that doesn't make any sense to me is that there were no early cases reported in close proximity to the lab. All the early cases in China were reported miles away, near a marketplace that would have been a perfect ground zero for animal-to-human transmission. Explanations?

both theories were equally breeding grounds for racism now that i think about it.

during the January where it seemed (incorrectly) to be contained to China, I saw vegetarian friends of friends sharing a Daily Caller article showing that it came from people eating bats (which it might have been, we don't know, but it definitely wasn't known at the time) and watched them tee off suggesting they were savages (best believe I shouted at some motherfuckers over that). these weren't even conservatives.

lots of people using it to mean "yeah those backwards people eat bats no wonder they got disease". a friend of mine who is from China a few months later posted a video of a guy harassing him in a grocery store, saying he caused COVID. the friend wasn't really afraid of the other guy, but he was angry as fuck about it and rightfully so.

I still don't understand why the U.S. Department of Energy did a study on this biological theory... kind of outside their wheelhouse, eh?

hard to trust much data from the early days of Covid though, like in Mexico I think "pneumonia deaths" mysteriously doubled before the first confirmed case. I remember talking to a buddy of mine who is a physician on New Year Eve of 2019 and he was like "whatever this is, I bet you anything it's here already"

I mean in 15 years the CDC, Department of Energy, and Department of Education will all be folded up into the Division of Stuff and it will all be run by a high level executive at Exxon so

COVID spread wayyyyyyyy earlier than anybody knew.

people on the metal cruise of 2020 with me started a rumor that it ripped through our boat, as several passengers got ill with flu-esque symptoms, but it was never corroborated. however, was entirely possible - people from all different countries were on that boat.

(me, personally, I don't think so - it would have lit up that boat with way more cases than the number of people who claim to have gotten sick)

yeah - there was a woman who died near San Jose CA in Nov 2019, and she was later found to test positive (blood samples)

is it even widely known yet approximately how many people carried and/or spread Covid without having any symptoms themselves? even when people were being tested constantly it still felt like a self-selecting group that made it hard to draw conclusions. I know a lot of people (including myself and my wife) who got Covid but never reported it, idk it wouldn't surprise me if the "official" numbers were way undercounted. combine that with the wide latitude of symptoms and severity and Covid is pretty much the perfect disease for conspiracies

I was also in the Philippines right before the pandemic started (one month) and had a weird, unspecified flu-like illness (though I was worried it was dengue fever, as I'd been bitten by mosquitoes), but I think it was just a garden variety cold. but who knows - it was unlike my usual illnesses and it put me on my ass.

(mighta been dengue as well! we didn't test)

i am convinced i had it in late 2019, i was the sickest i've ever been, i felt like i was going insane. could have just been a bad flu but who knows

It very well may have been covid.. it was definitely making the rounds by then

My wife swears we both had it in late 2019 as well. She remembers being phenomenally ill with something we both caught after I went into NYC for a jazz gig. I don't remember myself, but it's certainly possible.

My family and I also got sick around December 2019 with something that had flu-like symptoms, though we tested negative for flu. However, it does seem like all the evidence points to this emerging in Wuhan maybe October 2019 at the earliest, with only probably very isolated pockets of cases outside Wuhan until January 2020. There are so many flu-like viruses out there and this was during flu season, so I think the most likely explanation is that it was a coincidence. Not everyone who has an anecdote of being sick in late 2019 could have had Covid, otherwise it would have had to be circulating much more widely than any evidence shows.

for two days in December 2019 my wife was unable to taste anything but salt. everything she ate outside of fruit & vegetables tasted really salty to her. then it suddenly went away. that was kinda weird.

My whole family also caught a bad, non-flu virus that was rampant in late 2019. What we had was not covid.

the reagan/carter 'october surprise' theory seems pretty likely to be true.

going back to 1857: president buchanan did some behind-the-scenes meddling with the dred scott case.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Wednesday, October 17, 2012 3:39 PM (ten years ago)

I actually didn't realize the October surprise theory wasn't accepted fact (can't remember where I first heard it), but this is pretty conclusive:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/18/us/politics/jimmy-carter-october-surprise-iran-hostages.html

Good overview of how a lot of discourse about Covid got dismissed as conspiracy theory:

https://jacobin.com/2023/03/covid-19-pandemic-lab-leak-conspiracy-theory-scientific-method-partisan-politics-evidence/

Oh hey you're back with that

The scientific community never ruled out lab leak, but believed it's not the most likely origin.

The people arguing lab leak weren't arguing for its consideration, they were arguing that it happened and wanted the scientific community to embrace it

Ok sure

it has been an odd few years because the lab leak thing was one of the first things I heard about covid (in late 2010 when it was "everyone in wuhan is saying sars is back") and the Chinese dissident communities (for all their various faults) have stuck with it ever since, while opinion in the west seems to bubble and sway on the basis of very little evidence one way or the other. it helps if you already knew wuhan as being well-known for this I guess.

lol 2019 not 2010, my arthritis is flaring up terribly and I can barely type on this stupid phone

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craze-was-created-by-government

The "War on Drugs" was started by the Nixon Administration as a way to crack down on Black people and "hippies."

xp I posted earlier in the what are you reading thread about the ufo book I'm in the middle of. Just picked it up for the first time today and the chapter I started leads with the skinwalker ranch. Coincidence? Or conspiracy?